There were two striking pieces of business news this week from America's leading technology brands. On the one hand, Google unveiled a prototype of an autonomous car that, if it can be made to work at scale, promises to end mass automobile ownership while drastically reducing car wreck fatalities and auto-related pollution. Meanwhile, Apple bought a company that makes high-end headphones.

Which is to say that Apple's playing checkers while Google plays chess.

For better or worse, this is exactly why many people seem to hold Google in higher regard than they do Apple. Both Apple and Google are rich and wealthy beyond average-person-measure. Now, which company will be liked more: the one that uses said wealth to develop crazy may-or-may
-not-work technologies that can change the world at a massively substantial scale, or the one that stuffs $150 billion in shady bank accounts to avoid having to pay taxes?

The more wealth you hoard, the less sympathetic people will be towards you. Unless, of course, you use that wealth in a very public way.

Honestly, I think the main difference at this point between Google and Apple is that Apple is ran more by hipsters and Google is ran more by nerds.

The hipsters are of the mindset that if it's design is cool, than that's better.

Nerds care more about functions and gadgets. This is why Google is the one who is experimenting with all the self-driving cars, and google glass stuff. Apple takes years of previous work, polishes it up a bit and releases. Which is why all of their new releases are evolutionary instead of revolutionary.

1) GMail. It was first email, where you could have as much mail as you wanted and never had to delete anything. If you came from provider with 10-15 MB account size, it was a godsend. For the first time, you could have all your email on server, not that POP3 nonsense, where you were wondering on which device the email ended up. It was really the first one that was worry free. It literally changed user's attitude towards email.

The labels instead of folders were just a cherry on the top.

2). Maps. Making available always-up-to-date geospatial data for free or low fee is huge. Before that, if you wanted ortofoto of a small city (about 300 km^2), you had to shell out about 12K EUR. No updates, of course, if you wanted newer data, you had to buy them again. The same for maps, landbase, geocoding... Now it is available on the web, for free. Many people still don't realize, how huge this is.